Facebook Publishing

The British publisher ever so slightly edged out its Nigerian rival Legit, which had just 4 million or so engagements fewer than the Mail between December 1 and February 28.

Again, publishers such as NBC and Fox News include the whole umbrella here, so the local news affiliates and the likes of Fox Business and CNBC 
are included within those engagement counts.

A relative newcomer to the high end of the rankings was People, whose celebrity news made the publisher one of the top ten most engaged on Facebook overall during the last three months.

Worthy of special mention here is the Manchester Evening News, a local UK publication that found itself in the top fifteen publishers ahead of a number 
of national outlets thanks to its sports coverage, principally of its two local soccer teams — Manchester United and Manchester City.

This has remained a theme in recent reports — while the engagement to other topics such as politics and the law have generally declined since the 2020 election, reaction to public figures’ deaths has remained at a similar level as it had in the previous few years, leading those topics to climb up the attention charts.

The three that saw the most engagement in the last three months were the deaths of Kirstie Alley, Lisa Marie Presley, and Ellen’s DJ ‘tWitch’.

Other stories of note included internet and professional success in the Philippines, as well as an NHL star refusing to wear a rainbow jersey.

David Crosby’s death also featured among the top ten most engaged stories.

Where there were five stories about celebrity deaths in the top ten overall, there were 17 in the top 100, which shows that they were somewhat over indexed towards the top of the list, but still appeared repeatedly among stories 11—100.

Soft stories held the plurality, with a fifth of the top 100 being some kind of child/animal/feel-good update, but the majority was still serious news of some kind. One sub-genre of these feel-good stories that were common enough to break out on their own was a high proliferation of stories about elderly people reaching ages over 100, which made up 14 of the top 100 stories. We have seen a real rise in this type of profile performing well on recent months, particularly from local media.

Culture, politics, and tech all saw some level of success, but sport was the other most popular genre of post in the last three months — perhaps unsurprising given the period contained both the World Cup Final and the Super Bowl.

As we previously noted, the time period we are looking at in this report contained the World Cup final, and that only helped the engagement of soccer pages, which had already begun to see success even before the tournament.

ESPNFC, which focuses specifically on soccer, was the top page on Facebook, in the last three months, with almost 150 million engagements. Fellow soccer publications Oh My Goal, GOAL and Bleacher Report Football also made it into the top five, and there were several other sports pages in the top 15.

LADbible was the only page not explicitly related to sports in the top five, while Met Dean also performed well overall.

This presented quite a different story, with more than half the top posts being either photos or carousels of photos. Native video was the other dominant category, with around 46% of the top posts.

One trend that has solidified is the decline of pure link posts. Where on occasion we have seen some 700 or 800 link posts among the top 10,000 posts, this three-month period saw just 137 link posts among the most engaged posts.